Ep 256: The Post-it Note That Tells You What Your Time Is Really Worth with Louis Swart

SHOWNOTES

“Louis, your business is worth nothing.” Louis Swart was 25, running a plumbing business with ten plumbers, and he had just asked a broker what he could sell it for. The broker asked who did the accounts. The quality control. The quoting. Every answer was Louis. Five years later he sold a different business (200 staff) in two weeks flat. What changed wasn’t how hard he worked. It was what he was willing to hand over, and what he had to stop believing about himself first.

Louis went on to build a business turning over $35 million with 450 staff, then spent years training as an NLP master practitioner, hypnotherapist and coach, trying to work out why the success hadn’t made him happy. He’s the founder of Ironbrij, which places AI-supported virtual assistants into small businesses, and the author of The B Myth.

We Also Talked About

• Why “who does the accounts?” is the only question that matters when you’re valuing your own business.
• How busyness gets quietly wired to love, safety and worthiness, and why that’s the real thing blocking delegation.
• The delegate, elevate, accelerate process, and why the first step is the one everyone stalls on.
• The 60% rule: stop hunting for someone who works like you and start stacking productivity instead.
• Turning a single screen recording into an SOP and a checklist, instead of losing a week to screenshots.
• The “rip-off and duplicate” R&D department every solopreneur already has.
• Fixing the process rather than the person when something falls through the cracks.
• Where AI genuinely outperforms a human, where it quietly fails, and why Louis still wants both.
• The platform-dependency risk nobody prices in when they build a business on someone else’s agent.
• A low-tech Post-it Note tool for working out whether the task in front of you is worth your time.

Resources Mentioned

• Louis Swart’s website: https://louisswart.com/
• Louis’s free resources and downloadable tools: https://louisswart.com/resources/
• Louis’s book – The B Myth: How Successful People Accidentally Build Businesses That Steal Their Lives (affiliate link)
• Ironbrij, Louis’s virtual assistant and business coaching agency: https://ironbrij.com.au/
• Loom, for recording a process and generating an SOP from it: https://www.loom.com/
• n8n, the automation platform Louis used to build his first meeting-prep agent: https://n8n.io/
• Canva: https://www.canva.com/

My newsletter is for people who need a way to make money from home so they can build a better life for themselves and their families:
👉 https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter

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Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

Episode 256: The Post-it Note That Tells You What Your Time Is Really Worth with Louis Swart

[00:00:00]

Trudy Rankin: Louis Swart was 25 years old. He was sitting across from a business broker feeling pretty pleased with himself. He had a plumbing business with 10 plumbers, and he wanted to know what it was worth. So the broker asked him three questions: Who does the accounts? Who does the quality control? And who does the quoting?

And then told him that his business was worth nothing. Now, Louis said that he still gets cold shivers telling that story, and what he did about it changed the shape of every business he’s built ever since. In this episode, we get into why handing work over to someone else is so much harder than it looks, and why the real obstacle isn’t actually the work.

We look at how to capture what you do without it taking a week to do that, look at where AI genuinely earns its keep and where it quietly lets you down, And a very low-tech tool that Louis uses to decide whether the task in front of him is worth doing at [00:01:00] all.

Now, Louis has built and sold several businesses, including one turning over $35 million with 450 staff, and he now spends his time helping small business owners just get out of their own way.

Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin, and if you’re someone who needs a flexible work-from-home option, I help you grow the online side of your business so that you can earn more, stress less, and have greater freedom in how you live.

And today I’ve got Louis Swart with me, and he’s somebody who helps people free up time by delegating all those low level but really necessary tasks to an AI trained virtual assistant which sounds really wonderful and lovely and scary at the same time, especially if [00:02:00] you’re somebody who’s been sort of playing around at the edges of AI.

Maybe you’ve figured out how to prompt, maybe you haven’t got that far, maybe you’re a little bit further than that. But Louis had quite a number of years of experience working with people as a coach. He’s the founder of Ironbrij, and today we’re going to cover off this topic of how you can do this whole thing that’s going to free up your time in a way that’s not going to make you feel overwhelmed.

And I make that promise not having asked Louis whether I can make that promise, but I know from my own experience that it is actually possible to do. So Louis, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Louis Swart: Trudy, thank you. I really, really appreciate this, and, you know, I love a podcasts like yours because really you’re just helping business owners to condense their time.

So you’re finding experience from all over the world, people that have made the mistakes, and you’re interviewing them and you’re working out how can these people actually save time and be more successful? So thank [00:03:00] you for doing what you’re doing.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. So just as we get started, maybe if you could just share with the listeners a little bit about yourself and then move into how you got started with doing what you do.

Louis Swart: Okay. So, you know, I remember being 30, having sold a business for 5 million, sitting in the bank, them counting out the money, and, um, thinking back to a business I had. I had a plumbing business when I was 25, and I had 10 plumbers. I thought I’d sell it for, like, you know, retire. And I went to a broker and I said, “How much can I get for this business?”

And I was probably a bit cocky, 25. A bit like, “How much, how much can I get for this? Who can afford it?” And he said, “Louis, who does the accounts?” And I said, “Well, I do them.” “Who does the quality control?” “Oh, well, I do it.” “Who does the quoting?” “I do it, I do it, I do it, I do it, I do it.” Because, you know how I was brought up.

If you want something done right, you need to do it yourself. So that’s how I was brought up, so obviously it must be perfect because I did it, I did, I did it, I did, I did. And he said to me, “Louis, your business is worth [00:04:00] nothing.” And I, to this day when I say that, I get these cold shivers because it was just this absolute blow to realize that I didn’t actually own a business.

I literally had just created myself this glorified job. And so then fast-forward, I learned how to delegate. So when it came to sell the business when I was 30, by that time I had 200 staff, and now they said, “Who does this? Who does this? Who does that? Who does this?” And none of the fingers pointed to me.

And so we were able to sell that business in two weeks really quickly which was amazing. And then we came to Australia, every entrepreneur’s journey. Some amazing wins, some amazing epic fails, okay? And the last business grew to 35 million, turning over 35 million with 450 staff.

So along the way I’ve learnt so much about delegation. I’ve learnt so many mistakes that you can make, and so many amazing things that you can do to actually benefit, and that’s what I really want to share with people. I want to share that knowledge with your [00:05:00] listeners.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, I mean, it’s quite a journey.

And the only way to get there is to actually do the journey, and that is making that mindset shift. The mental changes, the view of self that you have to make that goes from, “Hey, I’m the one who’s doing everything,” to, “Hey, I’m the boss,” and then to, “Hey, I can be more than a boss.

Now I can help other people learn how to do the same things.” It is quite a shift. How uncomfortable was that shift for you, making that jump from I do everything to I’m the boss?

Louis Swart: Great question. Great question. It’s actually quite uncomfortable because you think, “Oh, it would just be easy.

I’ll just say to somebody, ‘Hey, can you do this instead of me doing it?'” And the reality is that we’re not attaching… When we’re doing everything ourselves, we’re attaching a whole lot of other things to it. So for example, in my book The Bee Myth, I talk about us being busy.

Like, “I’m so busy, I’m so busy.” And you meet people today and you say, “How are you going?” And the first thing they say is, “I’m so busy. I haven’t got any [00:06:00] time. I’m so busy. I’m flat out. I’m, like, just busy, busy, busy, busy.” And they’re not necessarily making money or anything, but what they’ve done is they’ve attached being busy to being loved. Because if I was, as a child, if I was busy, everybody left me alone or that I was commended as a child for when I was busy.

As a child, when I was busy, I was actually safe. Because I didn’t get into trouble if I was busy. If my parents came in and I was busy doing something, I was safe. If I was just sitting on the couch, I could get into trouble. As a child, people said, “Wow, you did such a great job.

You’re a great kid.” I was worthy. So I’ve attached busyness with love, with safety, with worthiness, and I’ve collapsed it all, so busyness is love, safety, worthiness, whichever one of those fits into your [00:07:00] world. And so literally us being able to delegate is going to that core belief. Literally we’re going to that core belief and we’re saying, “Is that really…

Am I still loved if I’m not busy? If I’m not busy, if I’m not doing everything, am I still worthy? Why would people hire me? If my staff can do everything that I can do, why do they need me? Am I worthy? Do I deserve to have this? Am I safe? Could my staff just take everything and go off somewhere else?”

And so that’s where the problem comes, you see. And so we have that as a core, core fundamental thing that stops us delegating, and the next thing is the surface level ones. The surface level ones are, “How can I trust somebody? How can I trust AI that it’s going to actually be able to do this for me?

How can I trust a human that they’re going to be able to do it?” Or, “What if I lose [00:08:00] control? What if the human does it and they don’t do it like I want to do it, and I’ve completely lost control of the whole process?” And so these are the beliefs that you’ve gotta get over. So that’s a very, very good question.

It really is a very hard thing to start delegating, and we’ve gotta do it incrementally. I completely believe in doing it in incremental steps.

Trudy Rankin: Circling back to that whole, you know, what if I lose control, I think that has got to be the underpinning concern for just about everyone because most people have high standards.

And if they believe if they don’t have control, then their standards aren’t going to be met, and then they’re going to lose face, or their clients won’t think they’re doing such a good job, all those things. So I think that’s really important. So you found it a challenge, and I know that a lot of other people do find it a challenge.

Talk us through just that whole process. You say you’ve obviously built up several different businesses and then sold them, so there’s a step there as [00:09:00] well from being the boss who can delegate to being somebody who’s almost a step up from that to being the business owner. And that business owner can sell their business and let go of that business and hand it over to somebody else without falling into a heap?

How did you find that whole process when you’ve done it several times?

Louis Swart: I love it. I love it. Amazing question. And what I’ve found is that most people, most of us go into business for one of three reasons. We want to have more time. We’ve got a corporate job and we’re working like, all crazy hours and we don’t have any time.

We want to have more time. We want to have more time to spend with our families, spend on our hobbies, spend doing the things we love. The second reason is we want to build something so we can sell it. And the third reason is we want to leave a legacy. So, you know, I want to leave a business. I want to leave a business to my children and my grandchildren.

But all three of those have got one thing [00:10:00] in common You’re not in the business.

Someone else is doing the business while you’re having some free time. Someone else is doing the business while you’re … when you hand it over to your kids. Someone else is doing the business when you pass on and you leave a legacy to your children.

And so really important that we learn how to do that. Really important that we learn how to … how are we able to pass the business on? And so I’ve got a process called the delegate, elevate, accelerate process, and how that works is imagine I’m a solopreneur now, and I’m just working in my business.

I’m working in my business day to day, and then I want to actually get to the next level, and the next level is that I’ve got to now learn how to delegate. So I now have to learn how to go, “Hey, can you do this for me? Can you do that for me? Can you do this for me?” And that actually allows me, once I’ve got people doing the work for me, I can actually elevate myself out of my business.

So we’ve all heard the term, you know, you’re working on [00:11:00] your business, not in your business. That’s where the elevate comes in. You elevate above your business. You’ve got people working in your business now, and now you start looking for new opportunities, and now you’re able to accelerate.

So the very first step is learning how to delegate.

Trudy Rankin: And that can be, once again, it comes back to that whole sense of loss of control. But it can be done. It can be done, and it does take effort and work. I just find it interesting that lots of people who start a business think that they’re starting a business, and what they’re actually doing is is they’re starting a lifelong journey of changing who they are, which is fascinating. So I want to touch a little bit more or move on to the part where we start to talk about how… And it follows on from the delegation side of things. And that is that how do we set things up, or how can listeners set things up so that they can, with some confidence, hand [00:12:00] over, delegate some of the tasks, some of the things that they’re doing to somebody else?

And it might be a human, it might be an AI. One of the things that I’ve been having fun working on lately has been building agents, AI agents, that actually do a whole complete set of tasks for me. I don’t have to touch it. It just does it, and it’s beautiful. I’m just blown away every time. Every time it happens, it just makes me happier.

It’s not instant. It takes a while to get there, but talk to us a little bit about that side of things and what we have to do to prepare so that we can hand over.

Louis Swart: Okay, so before we hand over, there’s a couple of steps we’ve got to look at.

So the first one is how do we find somebody that’s going to do what we do? How do we find someone who’s going to do exactly what we do, right? And when I was a younger man, I went to a mentor and I was like, “Man, I can’t find anybody to work like I do. People don’t want to work through their [00:13:00] lunch breaks.

5:00 they want to go home. Like, this is ridiculous, you know? I’m prepared to just get in there and do the work, and I can’t find anybody to work like I do.” Basically everyone’s an idiot except me, right? Okay. And he said to me, “Louis, you’re never going to find somebody who works like you.

You’re never going to find somebody who will work as much as you do because it’s your business, and you are the one who, you know, you’ve got this goal, you’ve got the big picture at the end, you’ve got the payout at the end, you’ve got this desire where you want to go. They’ve just got a job.” And then he said to me, “Louis, do you think you could get somebody to do 60% of what you do?”

And I said, “Yeah, I think so.” I mean, think about it. Could somebody do 60% of the content that you put out on social media? You’d have to be pretty egotistical to go, “No, they couldn’t.” And so I went, “Yeah, yeah, I think somebody could do 60% of what I do.” So he said, “Okay, so you hire that person, and now you’ve got 160% productivity.[00:14:00]

And now you hire another one of those people, and now you’ve got 220% of productivity. So now you’re doing twice what you were able to do before.” And that really stuck with me because that’s literally just numbers. If I hire 10 people, I can do 600 percent more than what I’m doing now. And if you think about that, it’s incredible.

And, in lots of fields you’re going to find people … Like, if I go in Canva, I know Canva. I can kinda get my way around there and I can move this picture around, right? But I’ve got guys that are just incredible in Canva. My agents, building agents, I can build an agent. I’ve got a 19-year-old guy who is…

he’s amazing at building agents. He’ll just go, and you’ll go, “There’s your agent.” And I’ll be like, “Whoa.” Like, I was still thinking about what to type in the first line, okay? They’re incredible. They’re incredible like that. So it’s finding the people that are incredible. [00:15:00] And my AI guy is not incredible in graphics, and he’s not incredible in social media, but he’s incredible in AI, and so I use him there.

And my graphic person is amazing at graphics. I just use him with graphics. I don’t use him in other places. And so it’s really finding those people and then putting the right people in the right positions to be able to help you. And so that was one of the really big things that I learned.

Another big thing that I learned was, like, SOPs. You really want to have some sort of procedures. Now, before, I don’t know if you did procedures before, but if we had to do them before, it was literally like, “Okay, I need a procedure on how to get somebody on this podcast.”

And you’d be like, “Okay.” And you’d be like, “Well, you’ve got the week. I need it by the end.” You’d be like, “Only a week? Like, that’s ridiculous. I’m never going to get it done.” Because we’d have to go and get screenshots, and then we have to put them into, I don’t know, one of the programs in Photoshop, and we’d have to put an arrow and, like, click over here.

And now we’ve got stuff like Loom. We just go [00:16:00] into Loom, we record this session on Loom, and I say, “This is how I want you to do this and this and this and this.” And then at the end, we just go make a SOP, and it goes boop, there’s an SOP. Shows you move your mouse here. It even tells you why you should do that.

AI generated. Tells you why you should do that. Then you look through it and you go, “Okay, I like this,” and off we go. Once you create SOPs and you create things like checklists, I’m a firm believer in checklists. If we onboard somebody, what are we ticking? What are the things that we’re looking for?

When we offboard them, when they say goodbye, what are the things that’ll be ticking off the list? And so if we can get those things right, it actually allows us to be able to then start handing the work over. There’s some other stuff, you know. Like if you’ve got a paper diary, okay, you’re never going to be able to hand that over to anybody unless there’s somebody following you around carrying your diary.

You know what I mean? So there’s some stuff here. You gotta use some sort of electronic [00:17:00] diary, et cetera, so that people or AI can access it from anywhere in the world and actually help you with it. So I think those are some of the fundamentals before we even get to the delegating.

Work out SOP. And we can delegate the SOPs. So how I do it is I will sit with a staff member and I’ll say, “Okay, when I’m getting a new person, this is what I want you to do.” But I record the whole session, and I go, “I want you to do this and this and this and this and this and this.” Okay.

And then I say, “And now you need to create an SOP of today’s session.” And then they create an SOP and give it to me and say, “Well, here’s the SOP and here’s the checklist.” And then I go through and say, “Okay, this is great,” or, “Let’s add this one thing.” Now you’ve got this amazing process. And when it comes to selling your business or getting your child to run your business or franchising your business, anything like that, you’ve got these procedures that are super simple. Everybody knows when a new staff member comes on, this is what we do. When a new customer comes on, this is what we do.

Trudy Rankin: [00:18:00] I think that is fundamentally true, that you’ve got to actually be able to capture what the process is so that you can hand it on to somebody else.

I’m just flashing back to some of my pre-business days when I was working as a project manager and as a manager, and we would basically look at projects. And there were two different kinds of projects. One was where everything was known about what you had to do, and the outcome was known.

And then there was the other kind where the outcome was known, but you didn’t know how to get there. And so when you’re a business owner and you are starting something new and you know what you want, you think you know what you want, but you’re not quite sure, but you don’t know how to get there, it is extremely difficult to create an SOP.

What would you suggest as ways of speeding up that process of getting to know exactly what you want to do so that you can create an SOP?

Louis Swart: Amazing. In big businesses they have a research [00:19:00] and development department, okay? They spend billions on their research and development department.

In solopreneurs and small businesses, we also have an R&D department. It’s the, uh, rip-off and duplicate department. So find somebody that’s got your SOP. Find somebody that already does a similar thing to you, and actually take that SOP and actually start using that, right? And then when you start using it, one thing about procedures that’s really cool is when you use it and then you go, “Oh, hang on, we made a mistake,” or, “My staff member made a mistake.”

Then I go back to the SOP and I go, “Okay, so on my process, what did I have?” Now, an example would be something like we do 100 points of ID. So we do identification to know that the person’s the right person. We put in there they’ve got to have a passport, a driver’s license, and a bank card.

And that’s their 100 points of ID. And then a client came through, and we didn’t actually get any of the ID. And [00:20:00] then I went to my staff and I’m like, “Why don’t we have the ID for this client?” And they, “Well, well, they don’t have a passport.” And I’m like, “Okay.” So then they just went, “Well, we’ve got a driver’s license and we’ve got a bank card.”

I’m like, “Okay, that’s a problem with my system, not with my staff member.” So then I went, “Okay, well, if they don’t have a passport, then we want to get a utility bill or something like that.” And then we fixed the process, and that’s the best way to do it, because your process that you do now isn’t going to be the same process you do in six months’ time.

You’re going to be adding, adapting. You know what I mean? Now with AI, we’re going to be readapting stuff quite quickly. Before you might have done the stuff, and now your agent does it.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, I want to come walk our way through just a little bit further along this process.

So somebody’s wanting to hand over or to delegate. They’ve captured the process. They’ve made it really clear what you have to do. There’s a [00:21:00] mechanism there to mend the process if it hasn’t sort of captured everything. And then what do people have to think about next when they’ve got to that place where there’s clarity, and now they’re trying to decide human or AI?

Any tips around that?

Louis Swart: This is a difficult one because AI every week is different. Let’s face it. The stuff that we were doing… I was telling somebody yesterday, I was doing… We built an agent. When I have a meeting, I want to know all your details before I jump into a meeting, and so my virtual assistant used to do that.

Then I actually built an agent on n8n doing that. Then I got a Hermes, like a local AI, on a machine in my office, and it did it, and now Claude does it. Okay, so now I do it through Claude Code. But I still need the human and the AI because we know what happens. You put in your details, and it goes, “Trudy Rankin,” and it looks on LinkedIn, and it goes, “Well, there’s 10 [00:22:00] Trudy Rankins.

I can’t be sure which one it is,” and so it just doesn’t choose any one of them. Whereas my virtual assistant will go, “Hey, I’ve seen Trudy’s photo on the PodMatch. I’ve seen her photo on Facebook. I’ve seen her photo here. This must be the same person.” We still have that human kind of… So the AI’s doing a massive component, but the human’s still doing a big chunk of it.

The other thing is talking to our clients. I know that a lot of people are just putting agents in to talk to their clients, but I feel like a combination of a human and AI. We can build rapport quicker with people because we’ve got this thing that can empower us.

Imagine if we had a factory, if you and I had a factory. And we had to pick up heavy boxes and we had to put them on shelves, okay? And two people applied for the job, and one guy’s a real big muscle guy, and he can pick up two boxes at a time, okay? And the next guy arrives.

He’s a scrawny little guy, but he’s got this Iron Man suit, and so he can carry, like, 10 boxes and put them on the shelf, right? And he can work all [00:23:00] day, all night. He just doesn’t get tired. We’d be crazy to use the first guy, right? It just wouldn’t financially be viable to use the first guy because the second guy’s got this incredible tool that he uses to make his job so much easier.

And so it’s exactly the same with us. We want to have that person who’s got the tools, and sometimes it’s we creating the tools and getting them to just work with the tools, make sure that the tools work. Sometimes we’re getting them to do the tools. So for me, this is… I love this. This is where my happy place is. And so I’ve got guys building, you know, they’re building agents for me. They’re building a whole lot of different programs and things in the back to facilitate more of these, which is what I enjoy. Now I could go and see what the latest stuff is and play around with that, but I’ve got a person who does that.

My guy that builds agents just builds agents all day. That’s what he does. And so you go to him and you say, “Hey, I want an agent.” “Well, [00:24:00] this is, this platform would be better. Here’s an agent. This is what I’ve built already. We’ll just adapt it, and it’ll be working for you.” It’s really that combination, getting that sweet spot between the two.

because the one thing that people also don’t think of is the cost of these agents, you know? Because we’ve got APIs logging into the back of Google, for example. So it’ll talk to Google, but that uses credits. That uses money every time it does that. Every time it does that, it’s using money.

And at the moment we know that GPT, it’s $30. It’s $30. But they’ve just raised $100 million to expand because the $30 doesn’t actually cover their costs. They’re running at a massive loss. And so we’re all running out there and we’re going, “I’m going to build an agent, I’m going to build an agent, I’m going to get an agent to do everything.”

And then when they finally say, “Well, we actually need to make a profit from this,” and they put the price up 10 times, 100 times, whatever, we actually have got all of our whole business runs on their programs. So we’re [00:25:00] literally tied into their stuff. So I think there’s a fine line between the two, and that’s why I think that the human-powered people to actually help you with your AI is really the sweet spot.

Trudy Rankin: I think that’s interesting and yeah, I have to agree with you that it is a serious risk from two perspectives.

One, the pricing going up so that you’re actually covering the cost of what you’re using, and they’re making a little bit of a profit. Hopefully not massive profits, but… that’s just the reality of economics. And then there’s the whole tied into somebody else’s system. Now, we’ve all been around long enough that is a known risk and danger.

I’m curious as to your thoughts about how in this day and age, though, we can get away from that, and how could you ever possibly live outside of that and not be stuck in that paradigm of having to be tied down to somebody else’s systems, especially when it comes to AI agents?

Louis Swart: So we can build AI internally. You can build your own internal AI, and you can [00:26:00] teach it off the long, large language models. And so when people are accessing stuff, they’re actually accessing your internal model. They’re not actually accessing the internet.

So there’s that type of thing that you can build. But at some point you’re going to have to update it, and you’re going to have to go outside to update it. At some point you’re going to have to do that. But literally that’s what most of the companies are doing now, is they’re actually building an internal agent that doesn’t actually go to the internet.

Because one of the cool things, I think, is we’ve got super smart people, okay? Incredibly smart people. And so I say to you, “Can I eat raw chicken?” And you say, “Well, let me just look that up for you quickly.” And you go on, um, thing, and you look it up. And Professor blah, blah, blah says that if you eat raw chicken, the chance of you getting salmonella is kind of, like, off the charts, okay?

But Betty says raw chicken, if you just slice raw chicken, you can make it like a sashimi or sushi [00:27:00] dish and it’s amazing. All right? Now, AI doesn’t know if Betty’s got the right thing or if Professor Jones is correct, okay? So it just goes, “Well, maybe you can.” And if enough people say, “Yeah, yeah, I’m also making the raw chicken sushi,” it goes, “Well, we must be able to just eat raw chicken,” because so many people say that.

And people do it to get views, and they… You know, so the people lie. People lie a lot. And so AI just says, we say, “Can you eat raw chicken?” And it goes, “Well, all these people said you can, so yes, you can.” And your AI lies. And it lies because people that are putting the information in, they’re not all the smartest people, and they’re not all telling the truth. And so AI’s picking up the averages. Whereas if you’ve got an internal system, you can say, “Hey, you can’t eat raw chicken. Okay? This is not healthy for you.” Anybody accesses it and says, “Can I eat raw chicken?” [00:28:00] It goes here and it looks at where these professional people are, and it says, “Well, you can’t do that.” I don’t know.

Maybe in years they’ll look at this podcast and they’ll go, “Man, we now all eat raw chicken.” And they’ll be like, “This podcast was ridiculous.”

Trudy Rankin: Somehow I doubt that. Not unless they invent a new different kind of chicken that doesn’t get…

Louis Swart: Genetically modified raw chicken, huh?

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, there you go. Or everybody switches to plant-based chicken. So-

Louis Swart: This is true.

Trudy Rankin: This is always a possibility. I’m curious about your, I guess the process that you went through in setting up the business that you’ve got now, Ironbrij, which you’re the founder of.

Do you want to just talk a little bit about that process and what you do in that?

Louis Swart: I grew this business turning over 35 million. Should have been happy because, I mean, that’s, like, the ultimate, hey. The ultimate is you got 450 people working for you, turning over 35 million, money’s not a thing, but I wasn’t happy.

And I was [00:29:00] like, “I should be happy. I must be a broken human. I must be a broken human because I keep striving and then I’m, get there and I’m not happy, and then I strive and I get there and I’m not happy and I keep looking for this next thing to make me happy.” And I was like, “I must be broken.”

And I decided what I’m going to do is go on this journey to fix me. And so I actually, I went and became an NLP master practitioner. I became a hypnotherapist, I became a timeline therapist, I became a matrix therapist, constellation therapist. I became all of the things that you could do in the coaching space.

Not all of them, not all of them. There’s a gazillion. But I became a lot of, a lot of them. And along the way I discovered that a whole lot of the incredibly beautiful people aren’t making money. There’s so many solopreneurs out there. Here’s a shocking statistic. 8 out of 10 people that are listening to this now are actually going to fail.

8 out of 10 businesses fail. That’s a massive statistic. And the scariest part is 8 out of [00:30:00] 10 sounds like a big number but what’s the emotional toll on those people? You’ve told everybody, “Hey, I’m going to go start my own business. I’ll see you later. I’m never coming back to this place.”

And then you start your own business and then you fail and you gotta go back with your tail between your legs. Say, “Listen, you know, can I get my job back?” You’ve told all your friends you’re going to start a business and it’s not going well. You’re running out of money. You’re struggling.

And so I was like, “Well, how do I help those people? How do I help smaller people? How do I help smaller businesses that are just kind of starting out? How do I give them that, you know, the leg up to be able to do it?” And I thought, well, when I had a big business, actually delegation was a really important component and I know that a lot of little businesses don’t delegate.

They haven’t actually learned the trick of delegating yet. Or the importance of delegating. And so I was like, “Well, what’s some of the tools that I used that as a big business? How can I bring some of those into people?” And then I started helping small businesses and small solopreneurs and stuff.

And very soon I realized the problem was that there’s so much information for them but they can’t [00:31:00] implement. And they can’t implement because they’re just absorbing more information than what they actually need. And secondly, they can’t implement because they don’t actually have time. And so people are saying, “Hey, I can help you to do this.”

And then they tell you how to do it. “Hey, I can help you to do this.” They tell you how to do it. But nobody says, “Hey, you know what? Let’s actually do it.” You’ve paid for a course. You’ve paid $10,000 for a program. How about we actually do what the program said? How about I actually work with you one-on-one and we actually do what that program said you should do?

And so that’s where the virtual assistants came in. So the virtual assistants came in because I now could get staff from countries where they’re cheaper, and we could actually put them into your business, and then they could actually do the stuff that you don’t really want to do. You don’t really want to do the ac- I don’t know, maybe you do.

Maybe you do. I don’t want to do the accounts and the admin and the stuff that’s boring and routine. I don’t want to do that. I want to do this stuff. I want to do this stuff where [00:32:00] I’m expressing myself and I’m … You know, I love this. I love this part of my business. Show me a spreadsheet with credit card reconciliation and I need a nana nap, hey.

Trudy Rankin: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Louis Swart: But I’d love to share a tool with the listeners, if that’s okay. Is that okay?

Trudy Rankin: Yes.

Louis Swart: I’m going to share one of the easiest low-tech tools that you’re ever going to hear about, okay? And this is really because I believe that lots of us don’t know what our value is. We’ve gone into business.

You know, we worked for a boss and we knew what our value was, and now we’re in business on our own and we’re kinda like, “I’m not paying the bills, and I can’t work out why I’m not paying the bills.” And it’s because we haven’t actually, we don’t actually know the difference between low-value and high-value tasks.

So what I want you to do is I want you to just take a second and I want you to think about, how much do you want to earn this year? [00:33:00] What’s your projected amount that you’d like to earn? Now, let’s say you go, look, I live in Sydney, and you’d probably need to earn about 200,000, okay? So I want to earn $200,000.

So I go $200,000. That’s where I want to be. Now, if you were working for a boss, you could probably work 40 hours a week. That’s about the max, and you maybe work 50 weeks a year. That’s about as much as you could work. So that’s about 2,000 hours. So we take $200,000, we divide it by 2,000 hours, and that gives us a figure of $100 an hour.

You now have a benchmark figure. Now, I suggest you double it, but let’s just work on that figure for now. So we now have a figure of $100 an hour. We need to make $100 every hour to get to $200,000. But what happens is, we start doing Canva, and you know this picture here, it’s a little bit off, so I want to kinda just straighten it.

So I go into Canva, [00:34:00] and it’s like 10:00 at night, and I’m still on Canva. I’ve been there for an hour, and I’m like, “Oh, goodness.” I’ve done a $10 an hour task. But I tell myself, “You know what? At least I didn’t have to pay somebody 10 bucks. I did it.” So I, like I saved 10 bucks. I saved $10. The reality is that I had to make $100 that hour, and I’ve made $10, so I’ve actually lost $90.

So now the next hour, I don’t have to make $100, I have to make $190 to make up for that hour that I lost. And when you think about it like that, every hour that you do a $10 task makes this figure ridiculously high, which makes your 200,000 unobtainable. And we do that. We go along. We go, “I want to earn 200,000.”

We go $10, $10, $10, $10, and then we go maybe $100, and then $10, and then we go, “I don’t know why I didn’t get there.” You didn’t get [00:35:00] there because it’s plain maths. Now, here’s the tool. I get a Post-it Note, right? And I’d like you to get a Post-it Note, and what I want you to do is I want you to write that figure on a Post-it Note.

So I want you to take how much do you want to earn. Every $100,000 is $50 an hour, right? And you would probably double it. To be sensible, you’d double it. So take that figure and write it on a Post-it Note. Now, I want you to stick that Post-it Note somewhere super visible. Stick it somewhere really visible on your computer, monitor, wall, whatever.

And next time you’re doing a task, every time you’re doing a task, I want you to look up that note. I want you to look up at that note, that Post-it Note stuck up on your computer, stuck up wherever, and I want you to say, “Would I pay somebody $200 an hour or $100 an hour to do this task?” So I’m there moving this Canva picture around, and I look up at this note, [00:36:00] and I go, “Would I pay somebody $200 an hour to move this?”

And the answer is hell no. There’s no way I’d pay somebody 200 bucks. That’d be ridiculous. They’d be ripping me off. And yet I’m paying myself $200.

Trudy Rankin: And there’s something there about how we value our own time, I think. Which is really, really interesting. That is a really good way of looking at that. I think that’s an excellent tool. I’ve just had a quick glance and I’ve realized that we are well and truly hitting the edges of our time, which happens so often, because I just, I think there’s so much that we can talk about. We could go a number of different ways. But it’s been really interesting talking with you and hearing about your story. If people were interested in either finding out more about what you do or your business, or they’re interested in your book, where’s the best place for them to go?

Louis Swart: They can just go to my name, so it’s just louisswart.com. So it’s Louis like Louis Vuitton, L-O-U-I-S [00:37:00] S-W-A-R-T.com. They can see my book there. There’s a whole lot of free resources. I’ve got a whole lot of free resources there where you can download tools that are going to help you.

You can download tools that are going to analyze your website and your LinkedIn profiles. There’s a whole lot of free stuff on that site.

Trudy Rankin: Excellent.

Louis Swart: And obviously the book. The book is great. You can actually download the book. It literally will take you a couple of hours to read, and it’s going to give you, like that one tool I gave you today, there’s a whole heap of those tools in there.

Trudy Rankin: Excellent. Well, I’ll make sure that I put those in the show notes, those links in the show notes. And once again, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It’s been interesting.

Louis Swart: Thank you, Trudy. I’ve really, really enjoyed this. And, um, to the listeners, if you just listen today and don’t implement, literally you’ve just been entertained.

If you listen today and you walk away and you’ve got one, you got that Post-It Note on your computer, this is going to change your life. Just by doing, implementing every single [00:38:00] time you do something, what can I implement? What’s one thing I can implement?

Trudy Rankin: Absolutely.

Well, there you have it. And if Louis has you thinking about handing something over to somebody or something else to do, then here’s an easy way to start that doesn’t actually involve hiring anybody. Pick one task that you do over and over and over again, the one you could do half-asleep, and then next time it comes around, just hit record.

You can use Loom or Zoom or your screen recorder, whatever you already have. Talk your way through this as though someone is watching over your shoulder, including the bits where you explain why you do it that way. Then hand that recording to your AI tool of choice and ask it for a step-by-step procedure and a checklist.

Take that checklist and the procedure and tidy it up, and you now have the first page of something that you can give to a person or an agent later. Total cost? It’s just the 10 minutes you were going to spend on the [00:39:00] task anyway. Now, Louis’ book and all his links are in the show notes, so have a look for them there.

And if this episode was useful, hit follow so the next episode just turns up without you having to remember that it’s going to be there. And if you’ve got 30 seconds, a quick review really does help the right people stumble across the show. And when you want practical help building the online side of your business and you want that help landing in your inbox each week, come and grab my newsletter at onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter.

That’s onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter, and I’ll see you next time.